The vote in Britain was extended in a series of Acts. The Reform Act of 1832 set a standard franchise for £10 householders in the towns. In 1867, the vote went to working-class urban electors, on the basis of household suffrage. In 1884, Gladstone’s Act brought in large numbers of county voters.
In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to women over 30. The Equal Franchise Act of 1928 gave women equal voting rights with men. In 1969, the voting age was lowered to 18.
The Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force on 5 December 2005. In England and Wales, same-sex couples could normally form a civil partnership from 21 December 2005.
Marriage came more than eight years later. Under the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, the first same-sex weddings in England and Wales took place on 29 March 2014.
On 29 April 2026, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill received Royal Assent. It makes it illegal to sell tobacco to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009.
The cut-off is a date of birth, not an age.
The Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper was professor of logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics from 1949 to 1969. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957), he contrasted two ways of reforming society.
Utopian engineering tries to remodel the whole of society according to a blueprint. Popper preferred piecemeal social engineering, because small reforms allow repeated experiments and continuous readjustment.
In 2010, the coalition government began a major reorganization of the NHS in England, although it had pledged “no top-down reorganisation.” On 18 November 2010, the NHS chief executive, Sir David Nicholson, told a conference: “It’s such a big change management, you could probably see it from space.”
The reforms became the Health and Social Care Act 2012. In October 2014, a senior Cabinet minister, speaking anonymously, said: “we’ve made three mistakes that I regret, the first being restructuring the NHS.”
British English has many phrases that favor adjusting what exists over replacing it.
A tweak: A small adjustment.
Evolution, not revolution: We will improve what exists rather than replace it.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater: Do not discard what is good while removing what is bad.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel: Use what already works.
Steady as she goes: Keep to the present course.
Softly, softly: Carefully and gradually. The phrase is short for softly, softly, catchee monkey.
Dave Brailsford became performance director of British Cycling in 2003. He described his approach to improvement this way: “It means taking the 1% from everything you do; finding a 1% margin for improvement in everything you do.”
He later led Team Sky, launched for the 2010 season with the aim of producing a British winner of the Tour de France within five years.
On 3 April 2012, the British government published its design principles for digital services. The first is “Start with user needs.” Another reads: “Iterate. Then iterate again.” Its text begins: “The best way to build good services is to start small and iterate wildly.”
A third principle, “Design with data,” begins: “Let data drive decision-making, not hunches or guesswork.”
Ron Davies, Secretary of State for Wales from 1997 to 1998, introduced devolution to Wales. He is known for the phrase “Devolution is a process and not an event.” He meant that the first settlement would not be the last, and that more powers would come to Wales over time.
In February 1999, The Irish Times quoted his fuller version: devolution “is a process. It is not an event and neither is it a journey with a fixed end-point.”
The Fabian Society, a socialist society that helped found the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party, took its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus. His nickname was Cunctator, “the Delayer.” The society chose a tortoise as its emblem, for a slow, almost unnoticed transition to socialism.
In 1923, the leading Fabian Sidney Webb gave the presidential address at the Labour Party conference. His phrase from that speech is usually quoted as “the inevitability of gradualness.”